The more I hear about her, the less I like her – and the more I figure we should go to the mat trying to derail her appointment to the Supreme Court – from Frank J. Gaffney via Catholic Exchange:

…this Supreme Court nomination offers a prism for examining the concerted and ominous campaign underway to bring Shariah to America, thanks to the troubling role Ms. Kagan played during her tenure as dean of Harvard’s Law School. In a speech on the Senate floor on June 16th, Sen. Sessions reflected on that role in noting a seemingly astonishing inconsistency in the nominee’s much-touted support of homosexual rights:

. . . Information has come to light suggesting that Ms. Kagan may…have been less morally principled in her approach than has been portrayed. Around the same time that Dean Kagan was campaigning to exclude military recruiters – citing what she saw as the evils of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – Harvard University accepted $20 million from a member of the Saudi Royal family to establish a center for ”Islamic Studies” and Shariah law…

Defenders of Kagan are saying that she had no responsibility for this – that it was Harvard, not Harvard Law School, which took the dirty money from the Saudis. But to be in any way connected with an institution tolerant of the violently homo-phobic Sharia law code while claiming you oppose military recruitment on mere grounds that they don’t allow openly gay service members? Seems to me – and to many – that her opposition to the recruitment stems more from anti-military animus than concern for gay rights.

But, there’s more – as the linked article goes on to note, Kagan has a role in Harvard Law’s work towards developing “Sharia compliant finance” – legal work being done to get our financial system in compliance with the moral strictures of Sharia. Imagine if anyone at Harvard had tried to get our financial system to be in accord with Catholic social teaching? You get the picture.

The Kagan which is emerging is a hard left ideologue – pro-gay when that can be used as a club against the US military, turning a blind eye to anti-gay actions when it advances the left’s multiculturalist agenda. Kagan is free to hold whatever views she pleases – but the Supreme Court of the United States is no place for a hard left ideologue.

We have the much better candidates, and they are determined to rescue our country from you:

Mr. Scott just won the GOP primary for the South Carolina 1st district – and win or lose this November (though I bet he wins), he is the future…you are the dead, tired and fading away past.

http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=Xd2GkUSUyt

The growing arrogance of these cartels is fueled by the lack of resolve on the federal level in the United States. Convinced that we won’t do anything, they are bidding for complete control of the border – and as I’ve said, there is no such thing as an open border. Someone will control it – as we refuse to, the drug lords will.

From Bloomberg:

A New Orleans federal judge lifted the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed by President Barack Obama following the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Drilling services shares jumped on the news…

…“The court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium,” Feldman said in his 22-page decision. “The blanket moratorium, with no parameters, seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger.”

Which is all exactly true and points out that Obama’s moratorium was the act of a man who likes to exercise power, but doesn’t know why or how it should be exercised.

UPDATE: Proving how clueless he is – or, alternately, how determined he is to please the environmentalists in front of November – Obama’s Administration will issue a new order banning drilling.

There is some evidence out there that we are not at all in good fiscal health, and the Democrats don’t want to let anyone find out:

House Democrats are readying an alternative budget measure that would set next year’s spending levels without requiring a vote on deficits.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) said the alternative would be the “functional equivalent” of a full-fledged budget. But because it won’t be a traditional budget resolution, it will be silent on future deficits, which are expected to average nearly $1 trillion for the next decade…

I think its much worse than that – lots of little things piling up which make me think we’ve got a cash flow problem. Here’s the most recent I’ve seen – from the Nevada News Bureau:

A delay in federal payments to Nevada’s counties is not anticipated to cause any financial problems for the cash-strapped local governments, officials said in interviews last week.

Nevada and other western states were notified last Wednesday that Payment in Lieu of Taxes funds from the U.S. Department of Interior for fiscal year 2010 will be delayed until July, a move that was criticized by Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev…

To give an idea of the amount of money we’re talking about, Churchill County got $2 million dollars last year from this – and while the governments affected are playing down the problem (at least, as long as its only a delay from June to July), the fact remains that for some un-disclosed reason, Uncle Sam is unable to send a mere $2 million to Churchill County. This is in a budget of about $3 trillion dollars. Its like a regular person having to delay giving the street person a penny – how bad does your situation have to be before you can’t part with a single penny?

Do we have enough money coming through the US Treasury to meet current accounts and service the debt? Remember, if we miss even a single payment on our bonds there would be a financial crash such as the world has never seen. So, we can’t forgo even a penny of bond payments. We certainly can’t delay social security payments and there are several other things which if we stopped paying they would expose us as bankrupt. But if we simply don’t have the money, then something has to give…in this case, is it some payments regularly made to some counties? What else is being delayed? In a government as large as ours, there could be lots of things and it’d be weeks or months before the word got out.

I think, my friends, that things are quite a lot worse than they are letting on – and Democrats refusing to even pass a real budget is taken by me as confirmation of my suspicion.

Couldn’t cook up a sufficiently wicked brew of budget malfeasance for 2011, I guess – from Bloomberg:

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag plans to leave President Barack Obama’s Cabinet in July, before the White House begins preparing its next budget, administration officials said.

Orszag, 41, considered leaving his post as director of the Office of Management and Budget in April and stayed on after an appeal from the president, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. Orszag’s decision to leave this summer will accelerate the process of picking a successor…

He’s just getting out while the getting is good – no one in their right mind wants to be minding the fiscal store when the 2010 budget deficit numbers are announced in October.

The first democRat deserts the sinking ship – there will be more.

Here is our Secretary of Labor, with in interesting message for illegal immigrants:

So, Ms. Solis figures her job is to protect the rights of illegal immigrants in the American workplace. Let us consider how insane this is:

The Executive Branch of the US government – of which Ms. Solis is a part – has decided to unilaterally abrogate US law (that which prohibits the hiring of illegal immigrants) in favor of protecting via a different US law (that regarding fair labor and compensation) those who are outlaws under our system of government.

Not only is this insane, it is also quite tyrannical – it is the rule of men, destroying the rule of law. No matter how outraged we are at the way some employers ruthlessly exploit illegal labor, the the actual issue is the existence of said labor. Laws about wages and working conditions are not applicable to a person who, if US law is followed, will be deported as soon as discovered.

And the worst part of it is that they don’t even realize what they are doing. Very likely, Ms. Solis has just been instructed to pander for hispanic votes in front of the 2010 election (which may well turn on the California result – with a victorious Boxer providing the 50th vote to retain the Democrats Senate majority). But this how democracies perish – by political leaders setting aside on their own hook whatever laws don’t help them obtain and retain power.

We simply must get them out of office as swiftly as possible – the future of American liberty depends on it.

UPDATE: Thomas Sowell wonders if we are on the road to tyranny.

Woohoo! Thank goodness for ObamaCare!

People who buy their own health insurance have been hit lately with premium hikes that far exceed increases in premiums for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The nonprofit foundation, which is separate from health insurer Kaiser Permanente, said recent premium hikes requested by insurers for individual coverage averaged 20 percent. Some customers were able to switch plans and pay less, so people paying on their own actually wound up paying 13 percent more on average…

And the really good news: We still don’t know all that is in the bill! Apparently, however, the insurance companies know – and are thus jacking up rates.

It is good to live in Obama’s America! Double plus good, in fact.

Stuart Rothenberg is thinking “wave” – and writes an excellent piece laying out his reasons for rejecting “anti-incumbent”.

I’m not one to argue too much with someone of Rothenberg’s political skill – but I will say that it is neither anti-incumbent nor GOP wave going on out there. It is a strange hybrid of both – with the caveat, in my view, that the GOP still has not closed the deal to turn what will be a good year for Republicans in to a stunner.

There is great anger out there over government in general – how corrupt it is; how out of touch it is; how arrogant some in the political class are. Given that Democrats are in charge, the beneficiaries of this are Republicans – but in the nomination of people like Sharron Angle (and she’s only one of many such) we see that while people are turning to the GOP, they aren’t just turning to any, old GOPer who happens along.

The Republicans who are doing the best – and who could turn this November in to a blow out – are those who are most emphatic in their stated desire to change things in DC. Sue Lowden would have been a fine Republican Senator – but she lacked credibility on the change issue. No one really trusted her to go in to the Senate and shake things up. Angle says she will – and she has the political “street cred” to make her assertions believable.

If the national GOP can craft a solid message of radical change and convince the Republican candidates up and down the ballot to sing from the same hymnal, then a historic victory can be won. We’ll see if we’re up to it.

An excellent article on the gold standard and what has happened to the world since we went completely off it in 1971. A quote:

Everything changed because the United States, having removed gold from the world monetary system, could “pay” everything in dollars, and without the gold standard as a limiting institution, it could print dollars ad libitum – without limit. Thus, in the 1970s the United States started to buy huge amounts of high quality products from Japan, while the Japanese boasted: “Japan sells; Japan does not buy.” A SITUATION THAT WAS IMPOSSIBLE UNDER THE GOLD STANDARD BECOME PERFECTLY POSSIBLE UNDER THE FIAT DOLLAR STANDARD. The Japanese became gigantic producers, their country an island transformed into a factory. Japan accumulated vast reserves of dollars sent from the US in exchange for Japanese products. This in turn triggered the de-industrialization of the US.

Take for example the US manufacturers of T.V. Some of the famous US factories that built TV receivers by the millions were “Philco”, “Admiral”, “Zenith”, and “Motorola”. The Japanese had better and cheaper products, and since the abandonment of the gold standard allowed Japan to sell without buying in turn, and allowed the US to buy without selling in turn, the result was that all the huge factories producing these TV’s in the US were closed down. That’s how “going off gold” closed down US industry.

Do read the whole thing – its what I’ve been one about for a long time, but this article explains it far more ably than I could.

Getting back to the gold standard is the only way for us to revive a genuine economy which has work and materials as the basis for wealth. We’ve used funny-money for decades and piled up massive amounts of debt to mask the loss of our wealth-creating industries. The problem we have now is the natural and inevitable outcome of the system we set up starting really in the 1930’s, but which only came to full flower in the 1970’s – and which has been progressively wrecking our economy ever since.

We can do this – all we have to do is trade in our nearly worthless fiat money at a 100-1 ratio, peg the US dollar as 1/35th of an ounce of gold (or the silver equivalent) and we’ll be back to a stable currency which will permit the genuine creation of wealth. On a gold standard, we went from an agricultural backwater of the world to the pre-eminent global industrial power…since we went off gold, we’ve not only lost our industrial pre-eminence, but we don’t even farm as much as we used to.

You want America back? There are lots of things we need to do – but gold plating our finances is vital to all else we’ll wish to do.